a way I didn’t want. Like George’s room, across the street, mine was stripped down: bed, bureau, desk, heavy dark rug. Over my desk, however, was a print my teacher had given me, after the successful completion of “The Conquest of Mexico,” of an Aztec warrior. The warrior had a strong jaw, and a flaming burst of feathers grew out of his head. In his arms, he held a prone woman, a woman who had been overpowered somehow. He was, for me, a hopelessly romantic figure, and in Bob Painter’s presence, I found I wanted to turn him to the wall.
Bob Painter stared at the print, though, with great interest. “What is this, an Inca?” he asked, and breathed in his funny, sucking way.
I corrected him.
He went on staring at the picture, then at me. “I have three daughters,” he said finally. “You’ll like them.”
But why should I ever know them? I conceived for him in that instant a disgust so strong that whole sections of the evening are blocked out for me. All I remember after is wanting him to go, wanting the course of our lives, with its secrets and its blurred-over areas, to resume. We ate steak. The light withdrew. I went in to watch television. I listened to the sound of them on the patio, my mother’s voice, now drunk, the loudest. I imagined my father again using the word “guinea,” and I wanted my mother to lift a gun and shoot Bob Painter. Or me, I could do it. I could take an ax and finish the job. But my mother made her loud noises and then her murmuring assenting ones, and the men’s voices rode under hers. It was like they were going away from her secretly, under cover of night, throwing their voices like ventriloquists, so that she could not know how far away from her they already were.
It was a Wednesday in July when he finally didn’t come home. At first, it seemed only another of his latenesses. My mother kept his supper warm, we watched television together. When, the next day, we still had not heard from him, I thought she should call his work. I understood, though, that even if I suggested it, my mother wouldn’t act. For an hour in the morning I threw a rubber ball against the side of the house, and caught it.
By afternoon, the waiting had become too much to endure, so I took the trolley into Boston. I was old enough to do that then, usually with friends, today, for the first time, alone. I knew my mother wouldn’t know or care. I explored the streets of Boston, looking for a movie, finally settled on Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man at the Saxon. I remembered nothing of it afterward, save for one thing, one detail.
I took the trolley home and walked to the Hill, then slowed my pace, certain that when I got to the top his car would be in the driveway. When it wasn’t, I shut off a light in my mind and went and got my ball and threw it against the house. I must have made too much noise; there was a tapping at the window. Uncle John was there. He motioned me inside.
I remembered then what it was about the movie I’d just seen, the single scene that had lingered. The boy, Nick Adams, comes upon a boxer, punch-drunk, wasted, in the woods. Paul Newman played the boxer, and with him was a Negro. When the boy comes upon them, they share some melted ham fat, and then the boxer becomes excited. Something in the boxer cannot be contained. So the Negro knocks him out. Taps him, and he’s unconscious. That was wonderful, that small and vivid display of power and control.
I loved that scene.
By August of that year, the houses on the end of our street, and Uncle John’s, began filling in. Something was evident right away. A new kind of person had come here.
Uncle John had said the names, “Meola, Semenza,” as though he were describing a delicate, expensive purchase he’d just made. But when they moved in, they ignored us.
In late summer, they began giving parties for one another. The rows of Cadillacs and Buicks began coming up the Hill. There were four houses on the end of our street, facing one another, and two at the end of Uncle John’s. At first, on the nights of those parties, Uncle John would stand out on his lawn, watering hose in hand. Perhaps they’d made a mistake, forgot he lived there. He stopped short of waving to the well-dressed people going to the party at Meola’s. His big house took on the appearance of a gatehouse at the entrance to an estate.
The sons of Meola and Semenza were also different from us. They played on the high school football team and wore, in their front yards, letter jackets, purple and yellow. They were compact, black-haired boys, guards, centers. They drove their own cars, too, and some nights brought their girlfriends up to the Hill. From where I watched, from my room or from the front yard (the grass had grown enough to begin mowing), they seemed to drive with an extraordinary calm. Beside them, their girlfriends, girls who wore their hair in “flips,” and who were cheerleaders for the football team, seemed to have all the energy. The girls moved, in the passenger seats of those cars, talking and gesturing with their hands, and when they parked in front of the boys’ houses, they waited for the door to be opened, and then moved inside, sometimes half-running, always followed by the boys, who moved more slowly.
It had been, in all the ways that counted, an odd summer. No one had bothered to tell me why my father had left. His disappearance, however, had been sudden and absolute. Apparently, he had not needed to take his clothes with him, wherever he had gone, because they still hung in his closet, and because it was summer and I was home all the time, I knew he didn’t come to retrieve anything, unless he came at night when I was asleep.
I still had my old friends, and sometimes, after supper, I would get on my bike and ride to Candace Road to play in the Wiffle ball games. But the old neighborhood held no great interest. Coming home, I would get off my bike at the bottom of the Hill, walk slowly up, and approach the houses, which had their lights on, like a spy.
In their backyard, Bobby and George might be sitting at their picnic table, talking, and though they laughed frequently, I began to feel their diminishment, how they were coming to understand that they were not like the sons of Meola and Semenza, and yet not thugs either, in the way they had once been, in the way it had once been all right for them to be. Instead, for a time they were hiding, just as I was.
Then I would walk down to the other end of the street to look at the newer houses, in which there seemed to be a heightened sense of life: more lights were on, the football team sometimes gathered, or else the sons of Meola and Semenza were there alone, flipping cards to one another under the extravagant chandeliers hanging over their dining room tables.
There were girls, too: Meola had a daughter my age, in my class at school, though we never spoke. Her friends came over and they sat in the backyard. I stood in the dark with my bike, and listened to the high murmur they made. They spoke in the same language my family spoke, but it was full of hesitations and conjunctions, mysterious nuances that made it seem a language all its own.
And here is the essential thing, the thing I was most drawn to: when a man, the owner of a house, would come out the front door, and stand in the lighted entrance, it was as though he were surveying something. Nothing need be going on physically for the world to seem alive and full of movement. The men on Candace Road who would come out to watch us play Wiffle ball were not unhappy men, but this sort of proprietary moment was not possible for them. A curtain had been lifted for me, I suppose, certain important divisions in the world were made clear. And though it probably wouldn’t have affected me the same way at any other point in my life, it did then.
Finally I would go home. My mother would always be watching television in the room we called the family room. She watched with one lamp on, and, frequently, with one arm slung behind her head.
“Where did you go?” she wanted to know.
“To
